Group: Iraq Postwar Casualties on Rise

Published 8:00 pm, Saturday, April 26, 2003

More civilians are being injured or killed in northern Iraq now than during the war, largely due to the breakdown of law and order and the dangers of abandoned caches of Iraqi arms, a human rights group said Sunday.

The New York-based group Human Rights Watch said it studied civilian injuries and deaths at five hospitals and morgues in the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. Health workers reported daily weapons-related injuries, both intentional and accidental, and many of the victims were children who played with unexploded ordnance, it said.

"In some ways, the peace has proved more lethal than the war," Hania Mufti, the group's London-based Middle East director, said in a statement.

The rights group gave no figure for postwar casualties. Civilian deaths in the war have yet to be tallied.

As in much of Iraq, northern cities are seeing crime surge in the vacuum left by the routing of Saddam Hussein's government and security forces, Human Rights Watch said.

Citing one example, the group said that on just one day last week the emergency room at Mosul's al-Zahrawri Hospital treated three civilians hurt when someone on a motorbike tossed a grenade in their direction and 10 people injured in a clash over looting, including three who died of bullet wounds.

Medical workers in the north also reported numerous injuries and deaths from accidental explosions, Human Rights Watch said. The Iraqi military stashed arms in schools and other civilian sites before the war, and Iraqi soldiers abandoned bunkers filled with rocket-propelled grenades and other arms.